Eclectic Views

    
I sent a picture of myself standing on the Great Wall of China, with a sorry
not to http://www.sorryeverybody.com.  It helps.

As with most things, it helps to stand up and say what you believe is right.
 And to make amends whevever possible when you committed or were party to
some act that did harm.  I did not personally do anything screw up things
for the whole world, but I am participant to what my government does -- like
it or not.  So I have to take responsibility; I can't just say "not my
president" and be done with it.  Would anyone like to have a chat about
"blame" vs "responsibility"?  In taking responsibility, there is power.  I
highly recommend it.
  

    
I'd be interested in at least listening to that conversation.

Also, thanks.  I meant to say that earlier, and I forgot.

(I'm doing much better, by the way.  Walking and eating right and all
that really does help.  Plus time, I guess.)
  

    

Good to hear, rosmar.
  

    
See there, rosmar?

So glad you're feeling better!  We need people of health and well-being on
our side!
  

    
O great and benevolent spirit Dr. Clymers, 
do you have prescriptions and/or incantations for people dealing with
flashbacks, nightmares, and unhealthy perseverations?
  

    
Please to say more?
  

    
Hmmmm.  Since the problems belong to others (my step-daughter and her
husband), I can only partly describe.

She is diagnosed with clinical depression; serious family of origin
issues, almost all laid at the feet of her mother.  The nightmares and
periodic perseveration about the past are mostly hers.  She is also
incredibly intelligent and seems to have moved all around the world of
talk therapy, and then cognitive mapping and bodywork type approaches.

He was seriously depressed from psychological abuse by bio-dad in
childhood, but only recently has been having flashbacks to sexual abuse
by him also.
  

    
Flashbacks are often the calling card of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder --
PTSD for those of us enamored of initials more than words.

Although I have never been a fan of this approach myself, I do know 
people who have had success with an approach called Eye Movement 
Desensitization and Reprocessing -- EMDR for those of us enamored of 
initials more than words.  This involves a therapist who systematically
has the client recall past events while focusing on an object (the 
therapist's hand, for example) that is moving somewhat briskly back
and forth.  The treatment takes place in a sequence of eight phases 
intended to accelerate recovery from past trauma and internalize
additional, more adaptive coping skills.  Check out http://www.emdr.com
for more and better info.

The good news about your step-daughter is that she seems to be taking
responsibility for her unfortunate condition and is taking steps to
heal.  There are many different ways to approach this, as she's already
discovered -- some are going to be more effective and appealing than
others.  My advice would be: don't lose hope and don't give up.  It
would also be to make sure she is consulting with a psychiatrist as well
as any psychotherapist she might be working with.  Finally, my advice is
to adopt a lifestyle that maximizes health and wellbeing in a general
way.  Specifically, good nutrition, adequate exercise, moderate-at-most
comsumption of alcohol, refined sugars, caffeine, and some form of
spiritual path or meditation.  Psychological and/or emotional recovery
do not happen in a vacuum.  While waiting for the maximum benefits of
her treatment to take hold, she can reap a lot of positive outcomes from
focusing on her general health and physical wellbeing.

That's my own thinking.  Anyone else have any thoughts for the poet?
  

    
EMDR = quackery

>>>

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)


EMDR is promoted for the treatment of post-traumatic stress, phobias,
learning disorders, and many other mental and emotional problems. The
method involves asking the client to recall the traumatic event as
vividly as possible and rate certain feelings before and after visually
tracking the therapist's finger as it is moved back and forth in front
of the client's eyes [6]. EMDR's developer and leading proponent,
Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., received her nonaccredited doctoral degree in
1988 and established the EMDR Institute to train mental health
professionals. She and her associates have trained more than 22,000
clinicians worldwide in workshops that in 1997 cost $385 [7]. EMDR
resembles various traditional behavioral therapies for reducing fears
in that it requires clients to imagine traumatic events in a gradual
fashion in the presence of a supportive therapist. However, controlled
research has shown that EMDR's most distinctive feature (visual
tracking) is unnecessary and is irrelevant to whatever benefits the
patient may receive [8]. Recent reviews have concluded that the data
claimed to support EMDR derive mostly from uncontrolled case reports
and poorly designed controlled experiments and that the theory of EMDR
clashes with scientific knowledge of the role of eye movements [9,10].
<<<
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/mentserv.html
  

    
That fairly well speaks to my concerns, yes.

However, I do know actual people who have had actual good outcomes from it.
  

    
I think it's the nature of the beast that if you were to make up some
random mumbo-jumbo and call it a "treatment", some of the people you tried
it on would get better, even if nothing else they'd tried up until then
had helped.
  

    
There are also a few thousand-year-old treatment methods, such as
acupuncture, which many physicians insist is based on misconceptions
about the human body and cannot possibly work, and yet everybody knows
somebody who swears by it.
  

    

There are a growing number of studies using standard western methodologies
which shows value in acupuncture.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed
and search on 'acupuncture'.
  

    
Thanks very much, Cindy 
(BTW, I do know it's *CLmyers*;  it's just that I go with the quick
dyslexic read, AND it's easier to pronounce!)

I had posed the question to my sister, who it turned out is a big fan
of EMDR, and other neurofeedback approaches.  Then, as it also turned
out, my daughter had in her own restless explorations, touched on most
of these bases and had very decided opinions about all of them. 
Decided not to get in the middle of them.  And, you were correct about
the flashbacks, they are symptomatic of PTSD.  It's just that these
things take time, time, time....
  

    
How are these episodes affecting her ability to do her life right now?
  

    
The flashbacks are his, and are coming from re-emerging/recovered
memories of sexual abuse by his father in childhood.  And they are
wreaking havoc, although by now, I think they both have developed some
tools for dealing with the episodes.  However, about a year ago, a
flashback triggered an interaction that then hooked into my daughter's
own minefield, set off a chain reaction that cost them (and me) several
thousand in court fees and a physical separation. 

Oh, how we all need so much healing!
However, I still am grateful in that in my view, the fact that he is
recovering the memories signifies a readiness for a much deeper and
more thorough healing.
  

    
Yes I agree.
Those flashbacks are an overwhelmed psyche's attempt to digest and
integrate and it's sort of like a pinball machine flashing "TILT!!!!"

I am hoping that incident of a year ago represents rock bottom for the two
of them and that they are finding better ways to navigate this difficult
terrain together.
  

    
thanks.  It truly feels that that is happening.  
There will always be a bit of rough riding when you hit the white
water though, negotiating around submerged boulders....
  

    
I was looking at old topics and saw this one being inactive.  I wonder
if the Krakpot Shrink is still around.  If so, I will pose a puzzler
that I am already seeking advice on, namely performance anxiety,
jitters, black outs in performing classical music publicly.

There is a certain irony here in that in the last two years I have
begun for the first time to perform completely free-form unrehearsed
improvised ragas in public.  For these, if I have any landmarks or
strategy at all, it usually gets jettisoned in the first few seconds of
improvisation.  Remarkably, I have very little anxiety or fears about
this style of play.  There do occasionally occur "glitches", but since
I am confident of my ability to turn these to good account (a great
jazz teacher once called improvisation "the art of recovery"), and make
something interesting happen, they do not hang me up.

Performing classical repertoire, OTOH, is a whole different beast. 
Playing pieces that I can almost play in my sleep and nail every time
in the studio becomes a boot camp of tension, anxiety, fear and
trembling, blackouts small and large.  This has improved especially in
the last year.  There is a big component of sheer competence and the
confidence borne from achieving higher levels of competence; and the
endless hours of practice are therefore bearing much solid fruit.  But
the gremlins still wait in the wings.  My sister, a
counselor/therapist, has suggested hypnotherapy might be a good thing
to try.  What says Dr. Krakpot?
  

    
Fascinating question that I'd love to hear answered!
  

    
Buh?
You bring me out of retirement for a performance art on performance anxiety.

Here are my thoughts, sir poet.

The trouble with such anxiety is that it tends to be self-reinforcing.  Have
an anxiety attack once, then anticipate having another one, which you do,
and so on and so on.  One goal I would set for myself in that situation
would be to break that pattern of conditioning.

I don't know if hypnotherapy would help, but it'd be worth a try.  As would
a cognitive-behavioral kind of therapy that is designed to break these kind
of thought/response patterns.

Another thought would be to call up Carly Simon and ask her how she copes?
She's almost as famous for her performance anxiety as she is for her string
of hits.

This article is interesting:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20631646/
  

    
Thanks, Cindy.

I don't think there is a simple one-size-fits-all answer to the
problem.  I'll report back after I speak with someone who, hopefully,
has cognitive/behavioral and/or hypno-therapy expertise.

Of course, a psychologist will tend to approach the psychological
aspects of the problem.  Traumatic memories, shaky self-confidence,
limbic loops.  OK, that's why I'm consulting a psychologist.  I'm not
sure I want to get into re-working the past events.  It seems to me
that this is almost a chimera, a psychological mirage.  But that could
be because of my own orientation to a more spiritual, holistic approach
to experience.  By that, I am not saying that I advocate avoiding the
traumatic, only that in my view it is better to subsume it under higher
level categories that allow for true, deeper healing.

I have been addressing the musicological and physiological aspects of
the problem.  Interestingly, Robert Jourdain's book, 'Music, the Brain
and Ecstasy', has provided some interesting models for contemplation. 
In writing about great performers, he notes that musicians at the top
of their game are focusing on the deeper musical hierarchies and
structures of the works, instead of the physical aspects of producing
the notes.  This is good stuff.  I had heard this from other performers
already, in much less academic language:  "It's all about the music;
stay focused on the music."  but of course, this also assumes a level
of complete mastery where none of the notes is posing a problem.  For
that, nothing can take the place of fearless and unrelenting attention
to detail, not allowing the slightest screw-up to evade attention:  if
it is repeated in the same spot, it evidences a physiological confusion
or "mis-mapping" of the sequence of events.  Slowing the suspect
passage down to extreme slow speed allows one to re-map the entire
muscular and mental process.  This is indispensable.  And in the past,
I was completely glossing over this level.

One major problems for perfectionists is the tendency to stop and
obsess when mistakes take place.  My current classical instructor,
[Bahram Behroozi], along with his many other considerable virtues, is
pre-eminent in not paying attention to small accidental errors.  He is
only interested in the mechanics of making music, and patterns
(repeated errors) of mistakes.  One of the best things musicians can
do, IMO, to overcome this terrible habit (stopping and re-starting,
obsessing...) is to SING along.  This seems to entrain much deeper and
powerful brain mechanisms, both conscious and subconscious:  allies
one's consciousness to the musical contour, the larger patterns of the
journey.  If an error occurs, one's singing and commitment are to the
larger pattern, and the mistake drifts quickly away like a piece of
driftwood in the wake of a fast boat.

Another helpful process for me has been to focus on "proprioception",
the internal/interior perception of the body.  To this I would ally
one's mental picture of the harmonic and musical structure:  in fact,
the mental "rehearsal" or recreation of a piece is a form of extended
physical mapping.  When the attention is withdrawn into the interior
castle, the danger of "accidents"/external events impinging is greatly
reduced.